The reason being surmised is that the frosty weather, time off over the holidays and the urge to merge just seems to take us when we’re not working so hard at our day jobs. Perhaps we get a little free babysitting thrown into the mix, with extended family, and the next thing we know, we’re due in late August or September.

Our blogs are focused this month on “The Pill” and also “Where Do Babies Come From.” You may be surprised that there’s a new thing or two to learn since grade 10 health class. We aim to bring you the latest truths that often exploit the party line on health and sexuality.

Jeff and I are getting ready to head over to Cancun early February to spend some time seaside with our son Jordan. He’s flying down to meet us from Ottawa and we’re excited to take him snorkeling in Puerto Morelos, the second largest barrier reef in the world. We also want to show him the spawning centre for sea turtles on Isla Mujeres.

Cozumel has a handmade chocolate factory that we love and the hot chili chocolate is mindblowing. We will rent a ragtop beetle from another era … okay from when I was a kid and tour the island. There’s a restaurant with mind-blowing ceviche and you can wiggle your toes in the sand while eating and watching the waves crash on the shore. I love to swim there after a late lunch.

Our hope is that you’re all keeping warm, or perhaps escaping to a hotter spot, too, this Winter. Either way, if you’re due in September, we’ll know that you created your own heat wherever you are.

Look around you, do you know women who live out of this state of mind? Perhaps you do too? Have you taken “The Pill?” Did your mother take “The Pill” before having you?

I, myself, suffered such severe migraines with kaleidoscopic vision on “The Pill” and then a mini-stroke at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto over 30 years ago. I also developed a tumour the size of golf ball in my left breast (go to the link on our bio to listen to the FREE audiobook for more), AND I also suffered this state of mind.

As Physicians (knowledge of the spirit), it is our responsibility to look at greater phenomena that has resulted from a patriarchal society and address each state of mind that spawns symptoms of this nature. So many of us have remained pawns to the insidious forces feeling like prey with no way out, deeply desiring to find our way back to our essential selves, our divine factory settings.

It is our birthright to first fully understand ourselves, the matrix we live in and then harness the forces of nature in order to annihilate diseases of this nature that keep us pinioned. Heilkunst Medicine, using the homeopathic principle: like cures like, enables us to do this. We can say “No.” It begins with us. Remember who you are.

All of us are under stress. Regularly we can suffer feelings of disappointment, frustration, anxiety, and guilt. It’s pretty much a function of being alive just as having air in our lungs and a beating heart in our chest. The NSOL combination is designed to mitigate these stronger feelings and reactions.

At Arcanum Wholistic Clinic, we supply our patients with supportive dropper bottles (and timeline remedies) to help lap away at both emotional and physical distortions as a preventative measure. These are generally prescribed on a daily basis in your NSOL (Emotional Support Dropper Bottle) with instructions to sip on as needed in your water to help mitigate issues as they present in your daily life.

This is a big part of the ‘wholistic’ aspect of your treatment plan, as you go through sequential therapy using Heilkunst principles. NSOL addresses the most common emotions that we can experience regularly as human beings, that can skew our healthy life experience. Sometimes these emotions are also more intense during the healing reactions of certain timeline events.

This remedy helps to also soften and release of any of these accumulated feelings, in addition to events that occur in the present, making it easier for the individual to bear the emotional load more expediently, by speeding healing. The secondary action of this combination helps to mobilize these strong feelings for release on the curative law of nature, “like cures like”, which is homeopathic law; preventing more trauma from being incurred in the present.

Here’s the breakdown to each rx in our NSOL combo and the links for you to read about each remedy separately if you wish:

S – Staphysagria is for frustration, anger, humiliation, betrayal, and feelings of being victimized.

O – Opium * or Papaver is for feelings of fear, anxiety, and lack of initiative.

L – Lachesis is for guilt, shame, resentment (violations of trust) and jealousy.

It is important to note that by taking your emotional support dropper with “NSOL”, you won’t become numb or complacent to life; they don’t stop you from feeling the richness of life’s offerings. The height and breadth of feeling will remain intact. However, folks often tell us that they have better dominion and choice over how they want to act on those feelings after having the remedy at hand.

We also hear from our clients that the remedies have helped them to burn off much of the past grief, anger, fear, guilt, and resentment so that reacting to issues in the present feels more appropriate to the moment, instead of dredging up a myriad of unresolved content from their lives. Internally, they become more self-reliant and emotionally stable, an internal beacon to one’s own self. We know this ourselves to be true as NSOL offers a kind of liberty to be able to discern how we want to react in the present without all the historical baggage.

*Note: Just a reminder that no remedy has chemical residue from any of these bio-energetic remedies. If they were sent off to a chemist’s lab, they’d deem them “placebo.” We know that the high attenuations are actually effective, which speaks to the millions of patients worldwide seeking homeopathic treatment.

My hope is that this missive finds you well and enjoying the last weeks of summer.

Early morning fog burning off the Kennebecasis River

It finally warmed up and stopped raining here in Maritime Canada and we made it into the brackish waters of the Kennebecasis River for many swims. Building our Tiny House and clearing our land of many fallen trees and brush has been a big job. You should see us working together with the chainsaw and axe to get our Fall/Spring supply of wood to cut and dried before the season. We’re both much fitter and leaner from all the physical work!

Casa Pequeña both inside and out

We’re expecting six loads of clean fill in the next few weeks in order to start working on leveling the hill that we’re on for our food forest. We’ve already got some raspberry bushes, lavender, mint and wild roses planted. I’m (Ally) in seventh heaven with being able to craft my own land into a rejuvenating ecosystem. The plan is to have enough flowering plants and fruit trees in order to sustain a number of hives of bees. It’s a work in progress and we’re learning much about permaculture principles.

This week, the solar array is being installed. We’ve been doing most of the work ourselves with the help of our friends, however, we’ve found an electrician who works with her carpenter husband to get the solar panels mounted on the roof and the battery, charger and inverter installed.

The view looking up from the Kennebecasis towards our densely treed property

We’ll be putting in the 120 amp wiring ourselves as our friend, Marla, worked for Bell Canada in Toronto and wired houses and offices with fibre-op for decades. Thankfully Diane is keeping the front lines at Arcanum in toe as we’ve literally been jumping in our clinic seats after a quick hosing off in the shower!

We’re pretty excited as later this month, our children are coming for a visit with their partners. It’s been 3 years since were all together and we can not wait to spend the week together. There will be a good ol’ lobster boil, bonfires and sausage roasts for sure!

We’re heading up to the Tiny House for the evening. Jeff has promised to play his classical guitar for me as the sun goes down. Life is so good!

Patriarchy can attempt to divide us; however, I know for a fact that folks can not be so easily broken apart by walls and borders. We’re lovers of the international state of mind.

I’m thinking of the Airbnb couple in Victoria, BC, who took us to brunch and wanted to know more about what we do here at Arcanum. I’m thinking of the woman who cut my hair in Guanajuato, MX, who hugged and kissed me as I left her shop because we’d become instant friends in an hour.

I’m thinking of the young fellow at the MacStore in León, MX, who said, “I like your happiness” and hugged both of us and took our pictures for their Customers Of The Month wall. I’m thinking of the couple in Cottonwood, CA, who worked in medicine and shared pictures of their beautiful children before making us breakfast at their Airbnb. She also shared her magnificent permaculture garden and koi-filled ponds so I could take pictures. I gave remedies to their dog and did some Bowen on his sore hip, and he was feeling fine by the next morning.

Jessica and Rosie, our lovely Airbnb hosts. She is into permaculture, mom of five grown kids, and an aquafit instructor. We loved her!

I’m thinking of the cab driver in Guanajuato, MX, who told me that my Spanish is excellent and to keep practicing as my best education is out talking with people like him. I’m thinking of the couple in San Diego, CA, who rescue exotic birds and rehabilitate them out of the goodness of their hearts. I’m thinking of the mother and son in Eureka, CA, who run an Airbnb and also take in elderly folk who can’t afford nursing homes and how we all ate breakfast in their living room and laughed at the news on the big screen TV.

I’m thinking of how quickly folks rush in to help give us directions, help us with translation, and just simply make our lives easier all of the time. My heart is swollen to her brim with all these experiences and nothing in the news or television can erase what I know is the steeped kindness of others. Their wide, open smiles and caring eyes swim in my veins.

Put the remote down, shut the lid of your computer, and go on a walk-about to far off places that you’ve never been to before. Perhaps study a new language on Duolingo so that you can communicate better. You’ll no doubt find what we’ve found in our travels to be true; love and human kindness is a thing, and it prevails beyond borders and walls. It is something you can lean into and allow yourself to be carried along with for awhile. It’s what is going on all around the world in everyday lives.

We’re all trying to balance so much! Often times, it’s not just the business, home life and kids to keep organized, and on a schedule, often times we’re having to be responsible for the collective consciousness for the entire household. Consider how often you’re asked, “Ok, so what’s next?”. Or “You should have just asked me to do that and I would have gladly helped you out.”

So many women I serve, and some men too, will cite extreme exhaustion. Not only for the actual tasks they perform at the office or at home, but because they also feel like the CEO of operations. This unexpected job description often surprises us out of nowhere. Who put me in charge anyway? Where was that written? How do I exit this role without the whole damn ship sinking?

How did the job of knowing what’s next fall on me? I’d never asked my husband, “What’s next?” in over a dozen years of marriage. How is it that as a reasonably intelligent woman I always felt my corpus callosum log-jammed every time? Perhaps my lesson was to learn how to engage with my own instincts and activities, leaving intellectual management to other individuals. That, actually would make sense.

In those moments, I definitely know I could use help. The first thing would be to take the task-manager role off my shoulders. When was this bestowed on me? Please supply a two page answer single spaced while I dress this roast of bison and finish prepping the potatoes. Perhaps you’ve lived this too.

While the offer to help is, in itself, an act of generosity, it can annoy the living daylights out of a Mom in a Sepia state. How many CEO’s of multinational companies can think on the spot of the detailed activities to be executed by a worker who barges into his office while he’s on the phone and also in the midst of forecasting the budget for the next annum? You see it, right? It doesn’t happen. At the very least, you make an appointment or see a more junior manager. Perhaps your spouse might ask one of the kids. Ah, not a bad idea, a kid will always tell you precisely what to do to serve them.

I recall feeling totally burnt out in the early stages of my marriage. In fact, I had the feeling that if one more person asked me what they could do, I might run my laser eyes clear through their guts while launching enough swear words at them to burn off their eyebrows. They’d grow back, right?!

I once recall trying to prepare supper while nursing an infant on the breast, with a toddler pulling all the pots and pans out on the floor, stirring a pot of rice pasta with the phone in one ear speaking to the guy rescheduling to come service the dishwasher who I had stayed home all day waiting for. It was a Friday.

At that moment, my husband walks into the kitchen having just arrived home from the office, and wants to know what he can do. The first answer that popped up to the fore is, “no clue” and then, “isn’t it obvious?” or to silently turn back and offer a tear of frustration into the pasta. This gesture alone can create a ton of animosity and then spouses wonder why dinner conversation is a little stunted and the weekly sex is dwindling.

I spent years stuffing my feelings down and taking Sepia regularly until my breast finally swelled with a 1.5 inch tumour. Among this, and other dynamics, I’d say this phenomenon cost us the marriage. It wasn’t until these very same issues started to crop up in my second marriage that I began to “get it”. The whole family plumbed solutions to help relieve me of the burden of doer and decision-maker. At the time, I was running a household, half a business, part of the farm, a kids’ camp (in the summer), writing a book and doing postgraduate research. Brutal, I know!

The summation of this post is that we finally did solve it with some creative problem solving. It took a team effort, but you can read that article here.

Contemplation or meditation is about developing the sight of God. It can’t be termed anything else. When we speak of “seeing” as a bodily organ, we are more often alluding to perception or proprioception, discerning the essence of a thing.

When I looked at the sunset in this image , above, I heard the sound of the waves and felt my bare feet in the black volcanic sand. I aimed my camera west at the cascading light of the mountains that surrounded Puerto Vallarta. I also felt culture shock. The image brings back that feeling of thawing from the cold, wet, rain of the west. I drove thousands of kilometres to arrive at the taking of this image that thawed my feelings of shock. When I put on my proprioceptive goggles, I might have discerned some feelings of grief and fear that were in me and in the image. You might relate to that image similarly, sensing my mood at the time or perhaps conjuring up a time when you felt similar feelings.

Vision or being “sighted” has so much less to do with “seeing” than it does with an epistemological event swathed with feelings that are soaked with impressions (feelings, functions and sensations) sourced both from inside and outside our bodies. Reality, as it lives in me, and in you, can be subjective (as in Kantian terms.) We can actually begin to develop an objective science of sight, so to speak, and render those sensed impressions into to a science of spirit: Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology.

In essence, this is the arm of Heilkunst; termed Anthroposophical Science; or the study of man. When we achieve unicity between God and man through our“soul seeing,” we can begin to sort out what is a function of disease and what is health. We can see or more accurately apperceive, discern and diagnose, based on certain qualities of feelings, functions and sensations (the Physician’s response)- trusting more in our inner soul’s function to “see” and apprehend phenomena.

This is why, as Heilkünstlers, we have no issues working with patients by phone. Our organs have been honed over the last twenty years to be able to “see” with all our faculties – not just with our eyes. A change in tone, a sudden in breath, a pause, or even a swallow inserted at the right time will enable us to perceive what we can not see. It feels like a transcendental meditation, adopting the spiritual sight, a departure from ordinary cognition.

In essence, your soul wants my soul to obtain the truth about you, so that you can be whole. It reaches out to me through nuances in symptoms so refined at times that you may not even be consciously aware of them . The soul is entirely intact, and it’s job is to push discrepancies out into our midst so they can be fully apprehended – their meaning sucked clean from the bone and annihilated. For us, this is the functional nature of the “seeing” phenomena for proper discernment.

Rudolf Steiner states, “Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.”

In this month’s articles, we speak about eyes and the meaning behind the “ocular” block as per Dr. Wilhelm Reich. Why don’t you take a look and see if you can wholly apprehend the phenomena around the meaning behind “pink eye” and why we don’t always use our eyes to “see” – when we are trying to avoid engaging with something in our lives.

When the kids were still at home, we had a couple of systems that worked well as we had two busy practices, both of us were doing postgraduate research and we had a farm to also run. Basic stuff had to get done, but I was unwilling to be the sacrificial lady lamb in the equation. Jeff, also, would not allow this to happen to me, either, so we developed some basic systems.

Every week we had a white board on the fridge and the four of us would divvy up the chores to be done that week, listed for each day. We also had laundry-folding parties where everyone would meet in the living room, the clean laundry spilt out of the baskets onto the floor and then everyone would help sort by pitching undies, shirts, pants etc. at each other until it all got distributed. Great hand-eye coordination and memory work with this one! Each person had their own basket to fold (or gather) their clean clothes into and then put them away in their drawers or closet.

If the kids needed help, they would ask as we buddied up when one child was smaller and more challenged with the task at hand, but they were generally part of the sorting party by the time they were 4 and running the washer and dryer by 12. Sometimes their clean clothes lived in that basket until they got to the bottom, but it had to be kept in their closet. It was their choice as long as it was “put away.”

The other thing that helped a lot is that we had a shared grocery/general shopping list app on our phones divided into categories like “market,” “grocery store” or “hardware store.” If stuff needed to get on the list, like ‘cheese’, the child had to use our phones to load it on there or it wouldn’t get bought. Over time, they both got better at spelling these items … but often either Jeff or I would be standing in the grocery aisle laughing ourselves silly as Jordan got good at writing items like, “monkey balls” or “penis pickles.”

When they were in their teens, they had the same shared list on their own phones and then when they drove, they also did the groceries. Yay! We helped to grow them into these shared roles from the time that they were little. They were also taught how to manage bills, make payments, and budget accordingly. Now, we’re showing them how to invest in ways that yield solid returns.

The idea was/is to make it fun, there was always some joking around, and the burden was never all on my shoulders to be the Queen-pin of our domestic operations. We also divvied up the cooking and everyone took a night or two preparing supper for the family. We ate a lot of the same things and our crock pot got a lot of use. Sundays, we’d get some music on, Adie would often bake (her Scottish shortbreads are to die for), I’d prepare one meal, Jeff another and Jordan would be designated sous chef or dishwasher. The key was that we worked together at all of it … including mucking out the stalls in the barn. It built a sense of teamwork and belonging. A dull knife and a carrot can keep a toddler busy for quite awhile!

In our practice, we see a lot of women chronically in a Sepia state (the careworn mother) or Cancer state of mind (rescuing others to the exclusion of self). It is important to activate the health and well-being of our essential selves so as not to default to this program often wrought by our fore-mothers. Trying to work full-time and/or homeschool and then also deal with all of the responsibilities of hearth and home (or farm) can start out as protracted stress and then become, over time, Sepia or Cancer states qualifying you for more aggressive treatments. Is it time to wake from your resignation?

Here’s the original article, by Lisa Wade, that this blog was inspired by ….

Many folks come to us to address a chronic issue; chronic fatigue, chronic headaches, chronic back pain; chronic sciatica, chronic depression, chronic anger, and the list goes on. This is where the journey begins, but it is not where it ends. Once the chronic symptoms are addressed, the patient generally becomes so curious that she wants to know how deep the rabbit hole goes into her psyche.

She wants to not only find out the aetiology for the chronic pain, but she knows intuitively that something lurks beyond the cause, something so rarified that she may have never known it’s purity this lifetime. Once the shocks, blocks and traumas are out of her way, she teases back the curtain to find where the joy resides. She observes this new way of being even though it frightens her.

She realizes her chronic symptoms kept her from knowing this state of being. What now? Over several weeks, she fans her newfound “growledge,” developing inch by inch her courage to know herself in a way that she’s never apprehended before. She cautiously reaches for the joy that resides just beyond her grasp. She pulls back, afraid. What if it’s transitory like all the other times she tried to know her wishes?!

She reaches, again, and it tickles her back. She wonders if anyone is watching, if they can see the Kaos in her. Her pure awe grows in the face of this newly realized essential self. She remembers feeling like this as the tiniest child. She realizes now, that the joy isn’t fleeting, but that the hardest task ahead will be to realize that she deserves it.

Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Scientist, and founder of Waldorf Education and Anthroposophic Medicine cites that children can’t in fact subsume, in a healthy fashion, reading, writing or mathematical concepts until well after the milk teeth have fallen out. The idea being that if you wake a child too early to intellectual machinations, you damage the fine tuning of their etheric (creativity and absorption) and astral (artistry and inspiration) integration.

In this over-intellectualized and mechanistic epoch in which we live, one of the greatest crimes I see in healthcare is over-intellectualized adults who struggle with accessing all of their organs for knowledge. They’re just not properly integrated! This produces anxiety and neurosis on a large scale as their capacity for trusting their inner guidance system (gnosis) has been tarnished due largely to the tyranny of forced education.

Parents who live in fear that their child won’t be able to compete in this global culture unless they’re bullied into unfolding their egghead processes early on, actually destroy their child’s innate capacities to become lifelong learners, something which ought to be borne as a self-inspired, inside-out gesture. Real knowledge has never been a successful outside-in game and never will be. You’ve heard the maxim, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

A natural curiosity is the stuff of health. It propels us from the Godhead of our ordination as human beings (not human doings) otherwise as children we’d never ask questions like, “Why is the sky blue?” If this innate desire is squashed, and replaced by government curricula and unproven homework that turns parents into hateful enforcers instead of advocates and protectors, we destroy a child’s delicate intuition.

When will we come to wholly trust, and have faith, that each of us will ask the questions – from an internal fount whose source is beyond our comprehension – that will propel the answers towards us? When will we come to the understanding that as we progress through our spiritual unfolding, our nuanced capacity to know will flow and ebb with each consciousness soul phase we blunder through so that we’re married to the functional purpose that evolution pours through each one of us?

When will we know that the gesture to bully and shove round pegs into intellectually limiting square holes is on its way out and that feminine wisdom is mounting a luminous trail so self-sustaining and rejuvenating that the silos of patriarchy are being revealed, and breaking down at an amazing rate? When will we know that the desire to “know thyself” is so flipping compelling to each one of us that its intrinsic nature is something to be preserved, not browbeaten or terrorized with ridiculous tests.

When will we preserve the essence of our innately curious being-ness as wonder-filled seekers?